


hate and anger

by spookykingdomstarlight



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Bitter ending, Complicated Relationships, F/M, Padmé Amidala Lives, Pre-Star Wars: A New Hope
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-27
Updated: 2017-11-27
Packaged: 2019-01-31 22:16:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12691257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookykingdomstarlight/pseuds/spookykingdomstarlight
Summary: “I pity you,” she said, quiet, willing someone on the other side to do something, anything. Shoot her, shout at her, get their Force-damned commander out where she could see him. She lifted her weapon, provocative and purposefully so. They wouldn’t hear her. These words weren’t meant for them. But Vader was special. His suit carried all sorts of enhancements. Surely one of them made it so that she could be easily heard. “I pity you, you bastard.”





	hate and anger

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AceQueenKing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceQueenKing/gifts).



Blaster fire struck the ground before Padmé, spit up dirt and laser-heated rock at her. Flinching back—even though she’d been fighting now for years—she hissed and bared her teeth. Frustration flooded her the way it always did. So much chaos, so much pain. So much that hadn’t had to happen. If only Anakin hadn’t been so selfish. If only she’d seen through Palpatine sooner. If only, if only, if only. Shouting wordlessly, she squeezed the trigger on her own blaster, shooting at faceless stormtroopers. They were people beneath those helmets, she knew, but if she allowed herself to think too hard about it, grief would choke the life out of her.

This was for the best. Even Bail Organa had finally seen the truth of it and he’d been their strongest voice against violent revolution. Padmé wished she’d been more vocally against it, but after—after what happened, she knew where this would go, how badly they would have to fall to get the better of this glorious Empire. Ideals could win nothing alone. They needed more than that.

They needed people willing to do the worst things imaginable and then do more.

It was why she was willing to come here, to this battlefield and every other one that found themselves shrouded with rumors, the one rumor that ever really mattered.

Darth Vader was here, Rebel intelligence said. The reason didn’t matter to Padmé. She would go to the ends of the galaxy to confront her husband—former husband. No, they were still married; she couldn’t deny that, not even to herself. As much as it turned her stomach, as much as she hated him, she still loved him. There was no hope inside of her that he would ever be Anakin again. Her hope poured itself into the Rebellion instead.

She found it fulfilling, but not as fulfilling as the life she should have had. Anakin should be here with her, fighting alongside her. The Emperor should be their enemy. They should be raising the twins, away from the fight as much as they could be.

She should not have to scan the battlefield for signs of the monster he had become. His presence permeated this place. The rumors were true; she felt it in her heart. She might not have the Force, but she didn’t need it to know where he was.

“Senator,” the man next to her shouted, ducking as blaster fire whizzed above their heads. “We should retreat.”

“I’m no longer a senator, Ruescott,” she shouted back. “You have no reason to call me that.”

“Commander.”

Padmé frowned. That was hardly any better. She was’t a military leader. She didn’t _want_ to be one. And yet, when she looked around, she saw a squad who looked to her for leadership, who called her by a title gifted to her by the true military leaders of the Rebellion.

If it gallops like an eopie…

Biting back the scathing words that threatened to fall from her lips, she shook her head. “We can’t, Lieutenant,” she replied, fierce and certain. He was here. And she had to confront him. If only she could talk to him… She peered back at the others, who all were so very young. Guilt twisted in her stomach. This wasn’t how it should have been, not at all. She shouldn’t be asking people to die for her.

Then again, she’d been asking them to die for her since she was fourteen. It shouldn’t still have troubled her so. Others of her acquaintance had long ago accustomed themselves to the worst that wars could do to people. They’d learned to callous their hearts to the atrocities they visited upon one another. Even though the people they fought had been friends once upon a time and some of their friends had been enemies not so long ago.

“You’re right, Ruescott,” she said finally, sighing. “Take the rest back. I’ll handle it from here.”

“Ma’am, you can’t be serious.”

Padmé smiled. She’d been called many things on many occasions. So rarely did anyone sound as respectful as Melshi did now. “He wouldn’t let them harm me. I’ll be in no danger.”

He bit his lip and glanced back at the others; he so desperately wanted to go. She knew it as well as she knew herself and Vader. But his features hardened. “We’ll stay if it’s all the same to you.”

“Very well,” she said. Her eyes scanned the ground before them. The blaster fire had ceased for the time being, Vader’s doing, no doubt. Padmé would take advantage of that. “Stay back. Keep in cover. He doesn’t intend to harm me either.”

“All due respect, you don’t know that.” Melshi straightened up and managed to look a little chastened despite Padmé saying and doing nothing. “Ma’am.”

“I do know that.” She nodded across the field. “I believe that.” If she believed nothing else about him, she believed that.

It was the only thing left about him that she could believe anymore.

It was comforting in its small way.

Smiling, she leaned toward Melshi. “Maybe don’t tell Mon Mothma about this though.”

Melshi grimaced, but he nodded. Holding tighter to his blaster, he looked out at the empty stretch of land between them and the enemy. He bit his lip and nodded again, as though to convince himself. “Yes, ma’am.”

A twinge of apprehension flickered beneath her breastbone; she risked more than herself here, she knew that much, a great deal more than just herself in fact. And yet, she had to keep going. It was too late now to go back. “Stay in cover,” she said, even more serious than when she’d first told him to do just that. “And no heroics.”

Melshi smiled, indulgent. They weren’t close—Padmé was close to few people these days—but they’d been on enough missions together to know one another’s quirks. “Never, ma’am.”

“Good.” And with that, she drew in a deep breath and stepped out from behind the force field generator she’d stood behind for the last hour or so. Strange how time moved in the midst of battle. She might have sworn they’d been at this all day. Raising her hands, not exactly in surrender, but to indicate she didn’t intend to immediately shoot everyone before her, she strode forward.

They would be suspecting a trick, she knew, whispering to one another as they tried to figure out what this daft woman dressed in white was doing exactly. Who would cross a battlefield in this way? She must have a death wish…

She did not. And yet she couldn’t stop herself from behaving exactly as though the opposite were true.

“Anakin Skywalker,” she shouted to the remaining stormtroopers, each one turning toward their fellow to shrug and murmur. She didn’t believe she could get her husband back—he was Darth Vader now and Vader was him—but she’d be damned if she didn’t undermine the Emperor’s various and telling attempts to maintain fear through mystery. So many untrue things were said regarding Vader’s origins, whether through rumor or official press release or any other way in which it was possible to lie about anything.

Padmé saw it as her job to rectify that. The Rebellion knew their greatest fear was a man, a fallen Jedi, a boy who’d grown up on Tatooine and fought heroically for the Republic and now scared systems into obeying the Emperor’s edicts. He was a leashed hound and there was not a damned thing he could do to stop Padmé Amidala from telling everyone that he was no wraith from the Unknown Reaches, a being of pure spite and hate and loyalty to the Empire. No, no. He was merely the best and worst the Republic and the Jedi had to offer.

“I would speak with him.” Her voice remained steady and clear despite the anguish hammering inside of her. This wasn’t the first time she would force a confrontation, nor would it be the last, she presumed. At first, she’d tried to turn him back.

That was a long time ago.

Now she merely hoped to tweak what was left of him, find a weakness, and exploit it to win against the Emperor. She wasn’t sure she could kill him—if that was even possible. She knew she should have tried. ”You might know him as Darth Vader.”

A gasp went up, just as she’d known to expect. These poor fools, so hidden from the truth by people far too powerful to wield the reins of government. She hated that so many of them must die in this war, that there was nothing else the Rebellion could do to stop them. Ever closer she stepped toward their encampment. And yet, they paid her even less mind than before. She knew the drill. Invoking their dark, furious leader put a stop in all of their minds that Padmé was the threat here.

All she had to do was give it time.

The bits of Anakin that remained manifested themselves in curious ways, ways that Padmé only ever managed to see through the thick, smeared glass that separated them, obscured by dust and fire and death. He would not dare snap at the Emperor, she assumed, as he yet lived and remained in the Emperor’s favor, when he never failed to argue with the Council about anything and everything back before all of this happened. Where before he’d maintained a brash, determined demeanor, now he was brash and equally determined, fierce in the same way he’d been while fighting, his clones and Ahsoka and sometimes Padmé herself at his side. He would have stalked to the ends of the galaxy to right a wrong. Now, he stalked to the ends of the galaxy to wrong a right.

It made it difficult for her to avoid thinking of Vader as something distinct from Anakin. She’d trained herself to believe them to be separate beings, because to do anything else was to admit that she didn’t know him, that she’d never known him if he was capable of this and she’d ever seen even a hint of it in him.

That she still loved the black-clad monster was something she dared not admit, not even to herself. The only thing she knew for certain was that she intended to kill this creature. One day, it would happen. Perhaps not today, not tomorrow, not any time soon, but it would happen and she would be the one to do it. For her husband, whatever was left of him, and for herself, who could only imagine how tortured he was.

It would not be a mercy; there was no room for mercy left in her and he was too far gone for something like mercy to matter to him.

She thought of it, then, as putting a pathetic thing out of its misery. Perhaps an act of mercy, but not done out of mercy.

“I pity you,” she said, quiet, willing someone on the other side to do something, anything. Shoot her, shout at her, get their Force-damned commander out where she could see him. She lifted her weapon, provocative and purposefully so. They wouldn’t hear her. These words weren’t meant for them. But Vader was special. His suit carried all sorts of enhancements. Surely one of them made it so that she could be easily heard. “I pity you, you bastard.”

The world seemed to halt in place, balanced on knife’s edge; everything stilled around her as she surveyed her surroundings. Nothing had changed. And everything.

A flock of dark birds screeched to life in the distance, a black cloud taking instant, violent flight into the white-gray sky as something, some _one_ startled them.

A hum sounded, so familiar that Padmé ached at the reminder. She could imagine that sound on another, more acceptable battlefield, where the wielder did good instead of evil, served people instead of empires.

For a moment, it was like having Anakin back.

But that hum was not the hum of the lightsaber he’d carried before, blue and magnificent, a broker of justice in the galaxy. No, that hum mutated and turned ugly, hissing nearly to the point of shattering. It was powerful, that hum, but Padmé was not afraid.

Her blaster bolt ricocheted as the red-lit weapon swung into action. Again and again and again until the gas canister was run dry and she could do nothing except throw it at him, too.

“So we meet again,” he said. This was not the voice of the man she loved. She felt nearly nothing for this voice, which was better than some of the things that he could have wrung from her. Fear, anger. She wanted no part of it. That was his strategy, not hers.

She would do what she had to do and that was all.

He stopped. His breath grated in and out of his scarred, injured lungs. What he was thinking, she had no idea, but suddenly he turned away, his cape flapping in the breeze behind him. His steps kicked up the dirt that made up the battlefield. Always it was dirt. He lifted his hand in a gesture that his troops—and Padmé—recognized as the signal to retreat.

“I look forward to seeing you again, Padmé.” He turned toward her slightly. “On the next battlefield.”

Her lip twitched, the urge to follow him, to plead, to browbeat him into turning away from this madness nearly strong enough to bring her to her knees. She knew better than to expect anything of him. He had nothing left to give to her.

And there was nothing else left that she wanted from him.

He would pay for his crimes and she would be the one to see that sentence passed upon him.

But today was not that day.


End file.
